Next morning, Tuesday, June 15, I slept late. It was so cold I didn’t get out of the sleeping bag until almost nine o’clock. I still had dirty dishes from the night before. I lit the stove, set a metal dishpan of water on to boil, and hopped back in bed. By the time the water boiled the trailer was warm enough to support life. A breakfast of toast, tea, ham, cheese and eggs and I was ready to face the day.  

The first task was to put the hasp on the door of the shed. I finished that and was soon on the trailer roof with a putty knife and a can of specialized roof tar that smelled strongly of asphalt. That was when I discovered that mosquitoes are a strange lot. At first they swarmed around. Uh oh! This was going to be bad. With no wind the little vampires would be just awful. Nope! To a bug they immediately left. Seems they didn’t like asphalt smell. I didn’t either, but then, I had a reason to be up there playing patty-cake with the stuff.

I worked all the seams from back to the front of the roof. Then I saw the reason for the water pouring in the other night. A dime-sized hole had been punched through the aluminum roof by a limb of the tree I’d rolled off the afternoon of my arrival. I had removed the plug from the hole. That would be bad enough, but unfortunately the roof skin was not a flat, single plane. Snow load and age had allowed it to sag slightly between the structural supports in the roof, making for low hills and shallow valleys in the surface. No wonder the water had poured in. It was being funneled in as fast as gravity could pull the pooled water out the bottom of that valley! A good dollop of black goo smeared well into and around the hole fixed that, and I was done.

I soaked all the shed walls and door with green wood preservative, set up the refrigerator inside and did some planning for the solar collector to help keep the battery charged.

Ken, with his son-in-law, came into the bay beyond the alders and we yelled back and forth. No, the dock wasn’t finished. I had barely gotten started. Yes, I was okay. They spoke to each other a minute then motored off. I think they were just checking my health.

I finally got to continue working on the dock. I ripped cedar boards and cut and carried some stringers out and rested their ends on the abutments already set. Unfortunately I let the saw get jammed with trash and had to take it apart to get the chain free. I had changed the chain on my saw a number of times and never had any problem but, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the parts back together this time. I took all the parts to the boat and motored over to MB Resort for help. Ken has used Husquevarnas much longer than I and was able to quickly figure it out. He reset the safety brake and everything fell into place. I had just been lucky before when I changed chains that the brake was always off. I felt pretty stupid about it but I got my saw back in order and learned a lesson. Ken and Jeanie were out of milk and I had some extra at the trailer so Ken said he would be over later to pick it up.

I motored back and started working my plan on the dock again. As I mentioned before, the plan was great. It was the execution of it that was like hitting a knot with the saw. It was slow going.      

One problem was that even cedar logs two feet by six feet long or one foot by fifteen feet long are HEAVY! Couple that with having to carry each of them from fifty to a hundred yards through a jungle of trees, stumps and logs, out the current length of the dock, then out on a flimsy trash pile to set in place and you have a serious impediment to progress, namely, a lot of back-breaking grunt work. The other problem was that ripping planks from logs with a chainsaw is no picnic. It took a while to get the hang of it.

I eventually learned how to work a cut all the way through the log in virtually the same plane. I would make multiple passes from one end of the log to the other in the same cut. The hardest thing to learn was to be extremely careful to make the chainsaw follow the track of the cut as laid out on the first pass. In the blizzard of sawdust, at times it was all but impossible to even see the cut and the saw would easily take off on a new track, so you’d find yourself cutting a quarter inch or so from the track you wanted, usually down inside the log, leaving a thin sliver between two more or less parallel cuts. Doing this played hell with efficiency, not to mention making a mess of the boards’ surfaces. I learned to shake the saw side to side ever so slightly as I worked. This seems counterintuitive, but it tended to keep the chain falling to the bottom of the original track instead of taking off on a new one.

Slowly but surely the planks came peeling off and the sawdust piled on the ground among the stumps I was using to anchor the logs. It not only piled up on the ground, it coated everything in the vicinity, including me. Cedar sawdust is not kind to the eyes, ears, and nostrils and is extremely bitter tasting. I worked at it the remainder of Tuesday and most of the day Wednesday.  

By the late afternoon on Wednesday, the water I put in Lawrence’s solar shower bag had warmed enough to shower with. And did I ever need a shower. I leaned the ladder against the trailer, hung the bag from a top rung, and put some flat cedar slabs under it to stand on. I stripped off, shampooed my hair, soaped and rinsed the cedar sawdust off. It is difficult to imagine just how mercifully good that felt, but the runoff had to have polluted the lake. (I didn’t see any dead fish the next day, so I suppose it wasn’t as bad as I thought.)

I had no more than gotten dressed when Lawrence and his cousin Anselm came into the yard. Anselm was there to help Lawrence mount his new solar panel and he needed the ladder for the job. Would I put it in the truck and bring it over to his place? Of course. I watched his progress with the wiring a few minutes before returning to my camp for the evening.

I lit a mosquito coil and the citronella candle and listened to a pop music station I found on my battery-operated radio. At first I received nothing, but after attaching an L-shaped wire to the antennae, I picked up a hip-hop station, then something more acceptable. Oldies but goodies and nutsey newbies shared the waves while I plotted my next moves to acquire cedar logs. The dead ones had become scarce in the immediate area. So had and the live ones I was willing to cut, for they are a pretty tree and I wanted to leave a nice screen of them facing the lake.

I blew out the candle and was just dozing off when noisy scampering on the roof brought me wide awake. On a number of occasions I have witnessed the ability of mice to climb vertical objects. And damn if one hadn’t climbed onto the trailer. If I thought I had mouse-proofed this trailer, I was definitely wrong. I tracked the sound of this one as it entered one of the vents on the roof, made its way down the pipe, scrambled around with a hollow scratching sound in the internals of the dry plumbing and found its way into the trailer proper, perhaps through the dry toilet. A minute later I popped the flashlight on a box on the floor and a large mouse flitted around it and back under one of the couches. Damn! They were a determined lot.

I delved into a now clean drawer and pulled out the package of mousetraps. The main reason I had bought them was that the unique design intrigued me. They resembled a large plastic clamp with a red V on it for Victor, the name of the manufacturer. I squeezed it open and it automatically cocked. I continued to squeeze it while I smeared a dab of peanut butter on the trigger. When I released the pressure it remained cocked. I set it on the floor near the box and returned to bed, wondering if I would be awakened by the thump of it being sprung during the night.

Thunk! Within three minutes I had the culprit and the immediate source of my problems was no more. I didn’t bother to remove it from the trap until the next morning.         

Thursday morning after breakfast I wanted to get back on the roof and take care of the vents so I wouldn’t have any more entry by skylight or some such from other little beasties. The problem was — I had given Lawrence’s ladder back. I didn’t want to have to be shuttling back and forth between our camps to share his ladder, like in some comedic Chinese fire drill scene. I would just build my own ladder. I cut two green cedar trees four inches in diameter for the uprights. That size would allow cuts of matching notches at the appropriate intervals and still retain the strength needed. Three-foot sections of the same trees split in two made half-round steps. I anchored them in place with dry-wall screws with a portable drill. It took less than an hour for the whole job beginning to end.

I fished the baked bean cans out of the trash, washed them, punched an array of holes in each of them and seated them on top of the three 1.5” pipe vents to the roof. I anchored each with high-grade duct tape and audibly defied a mouse to get in. But — there was another vent, over the furnace. I reached up under the edge of it and sure enough, there was a gap between the screen mesh and the interior edge of the vent area. The screen mesh that was supposed to prevent such happenings, wasn’t! Perhaps this was the very entry point of the now dead mouse!

I pried the vent off and gained visual confirmation of what I had surmised by feel. Okay, another tin can and the tin snips would do it. I flattened the can and fashioned a patch I could attach in an effective manner. Again, I verbally defied any mouse to get in via that pathway.

I suppose when you think about it, my audible directives and comments to non-humans can be somewhat daft at times. On this trip I had found myself talking to mice, alive and dead. I had a few choice words for the one that came in the vent, then when it screwed up and licked peanut butter, a jubilant “YES! You little bastard!” And now I was talking to mice I had never even seen.

Such episodes even occurred down on the dock, out in the middle of the alder swamp. When the wind stilled in the evening, mosquitoes would come out by the millions and in reckless disregard for their own life to attempt to use their God-given right to draw a drop of blood from my exposed skin, sometimes even if it was covered with thin cloth. My favorite question for them as they lay smashed against the back of my hand was, “Well, now, little fellow, how did that taste?”

Dragonflies fly around the swamp by the thousands, living happily on the plethora of mosquitoes. Because I always had a swarm of mosquitoes hovering about, big green dragonflies would come and snap their meals within inches of my skin. Until I realized what was happening, I was apprehensive of the clicking flutters when they happened beside my ear or at the back of my neck. I learned to be still and let the dragonflies do their thing, a cooperative relationship if ever I knew of one. “Over here, Greenie! Lots of skeeters here!”

Of course, I’ve been talking to fish, caught and uncaught, for most of my life. You’d probably never catch one if you didn’t talk to them. I cajole them in to the net when I’ve hooked them or in the more likely situation, when I can’t get them to bite, I do a running commentary on just what it is that they might be interested in eating at that moment in history.

At one point later in the trip I had a conversation with a young bull moose for forty seconds as we stared at each other through my open truck window in the rain before we mutually agreed that staring at each other was kind of silly and we went our separate ways. Before that I had a nose-to-nose conversation with the biggest black bear I have ever seen, but that story is better left to its chronological place in this account. I also have very little trouble talking with and to people occasionally, as you’ve probably guessed by now.

I have been known to talk to inanimate objects at times — like Thursday, when I decided to take one of the trailer batteries to the boat and exchange it for the big yellow one connected to the outboard motor. I pretty much held my tongue on the trip to the boat, as that battery was only moderately heavy and I didn’t have too much of a hassle with it. It was coming back that the tongue loosened a bit in response to having to lug the weight of approximately a cubic foot of lead. “You are sucking the wind right out of me, you know that?” and “I hope I never have to carry you this far again, you dumb yellow bastard.”       

Now, back to my activities at camp. I charged the yellow battery with the generator and connected the refrigerator to it through my inverter. I put some fish fillets and small bottles of water in the freezer compartment. This was going to be a test of the battery’s capability to run the refrigerator all night.

Friday morning after breakfast I checked the refrigerator and the battery. The refrigerator had frozen some items, but the inverter signal was complaining of a low battery. Sure enough, the test meter showed it was low — empty! This wasn’t going to work. I would have to use the generator to pump the battery back up and at the same time cool the refrigerator. I considered the setup I had for a moment. Of course, the refrigerator draws 1.6 amps, but that is only when it needs to run. The inverter draws a half amp, but that is continuously. So, the inverter was actually using more electricity, much more, than the refrigerator. I needed an inverter that was more efficient.

That morning Lawrence came by again with Anselm. He invited me for moose steaks for supper. And by the way, bring a rod and reel and we’d all go fishing afterward. Sounded good to me. I worked on the dock most of the day. When it came time to go for dinner I had a few misgivings about the fishing, for it had turned very cold and the wind was blasting the lake into whitecaps everywhere. But I washed and showed up for dinner right on time.

Lawrence was just finishing wiring his solar panels. He happened to have a small inverter from his earlier power setups, so I bought it from him on the spot. We went inside the house and he cooked the moose steaks that he’d had marinating all day. They were melt-in-your-mouth delicious and I found myself discussing the possibility of Lawrence guiding me (non-residents must have a guide, as well as the proper licensing) on a moose hunt next fall. It appears like a feasible possibility. We’ll have to see what next year brings before making any commitments to the project.

After dinner, the wind was still howling and angrily pitching the waves about, but we donned life jackets and rain gear and headed out. It was definitely not one of your better days to be out fishing on a big lake. We hid behind some islands and managed to catch a couple of walleyes each. By the time we returned to Lawrence’s boat dock, I felt like an ice cube and from their demeanor, I know the others were nearly frozen too. A fire in the wood stove and soon we were thawed and mellowed out with shots of brandy. We visited a while before I headed back to the trailer.

I sacked out immediately, as it was ten after midnight. Before I went to sleep I made an entry in my voice recorder journal to bring it up to date. My last words captured by the little machine were “We’ll see what Saturday brings.” It was one of the more prophetic statements I recorded on the whole trip. For “what Saturday brought” was a wake-up to bright sunlight with the trailer taking a significant shaking. “What the hell?” I raised myself on one hand to look out the back window next to my bed, intending to check the grounds in the immediate vicinity for an indication of what had disturbed my sleep. It had to be something big outside.

As I was putting my nose to the window, the trailer shook again. My sight was blocked and blurred by a large brown and fuzzy black object so close I could not focus on it. My reaction was to rear back to see what it was, though there was not a doubt in my mind. What it was — was the face of the largest black bear I’ve ever seen. He had reared up to look in the window at the same time I was peering out. My reaction was to yell something like “Whoa Bear! Get out of here, bear!” and slap the wall of the trailer with the flat of my hand.

He wasted no time getting down, but apparently wasn’t the panicking type. He just slowly turned and ambled off. I took note of his size as he walked away. His butt was well over three feet wide. At the hips he was close to four feet high. He had to weigh well over five hundred pounds — and he was not at all fat. He disappeared behind the shed. For an hour I wondered if he was still back there. Later on I did see where he had dropped a load in the path at the edge of the lake. In size it looked more like a cow pattie than what you’d expect from a bear, but there was no mistaking it for anything except one very big pile of bear crap.   

Surprisingly, when I got over my initial shock of the wakeup, I was quite calm about the whole thing and chuckled about it through breakfast. No harm done, just an interesting meeting and an extremely short one-sided conversation. In retrospect, I wonder if he was looking for food or for a companion or to fight another bear he thought might be encroaching on his territory. I’ve sometimes been accused of snoring in an incredibly loud fashion. In any event, I’m happy he didn’t find what he was looking for.

I returned to dock-building and discovered that I could actually save some work by using the truck to collect cedar logs at places where it had been piled up by the road building operation. I also found some appropriately sized standing dead trees that I cut, trimmed, and hauled. If I backed the loaded truck to the edge of the flat knoll in the yard to unload, I didn’t have to contend with carrying them through the tangle of woods to the dock. The rip sawing I could do at the unloading spot, which was only forty feet from the land end of the dock.

As I indicated before, the logs were HEAVY. I took a twelve inch log, fifteen feet long, off the truck and with major effort, hoisted it onto my shoulder at the balance point. Unfortunately it was actually a bit away from the balance point and as I struggled to keep my balance I had to step backwards — except that a cleat on my shoe caught on a small stump and I could not step backwards. Therefore, down I went — backwards with the log on top of me. I rolled the log off, caught my breath and gingerly checked my body for damage. To my happy surprise, nothing broke or was even more than moderately bruised.

After a few moments I re-hoisted the log, this time successfully. When I got it set on the abutments I sat on another log-in-waiting on the dock and examined the soles of my new New Balance waterproof walking shoes. Each lug along the perimeter of the soles extended one fourth inch past the rest of the sole. I proceeded to trim them with my pocket knife. They were superfluous anyway, had extended the length and width of the soles by an unwieldy half inch each. So, now they were leaner and less mean. Of course, the shoes really weren’t a pound lighter, but they felt as if that were the case. Now I could trip the light fantastic without falling on my butt.  

The wind blew fiercely all day, swirling sawdust in every direction, including blasting it into my eyes. I had to stop and clear my vision before I could continue working. Ken came by late that afternoon and asked how the dock was coming. My response was that I wasn’t there yet, but I could see the promised land. I didn’t mention that I was peering through a layer of sawdust in my eyes. The promised-land in this case was the last clump of alders before open water. I continued sawing and hauling the remainder of the day. That night I soaked a paper towel with cool water and pressed it to my eyes. It seemed to help. I woke up several times during the night and repeated the treatment and by morning the impairment was gone. 

Monday morning brought more dock work. Except for stopping out for quickly eaten meals I sawed and hauled material to extend the dock, each pair of abutments set to allow positioning of a pair of stringers, followed by floor boards, manufactured and placed one at a time. By ten p.m. with dark approaching, I placed the last board on the last span, and called it “done.” I ate dinner and went to bed, too tired to bathe.

Tuesday, June 22, 2004 before breakfast I heated water and took a thorough bath and put on clean clothes. It felt great. After breakfast I untied the boat from its cedar tree hitching post, motored over and navigated into the channel between a few submerged logs and tied the boat to the dock logs.

The slip was still encumbered with huge root masses of water grass. I used a crude wooden hook to pull some of it out, but it was an inadequate tool at best. I needed a hoe, a garden rake and a bush blade to divide and conquer. That will have to wait until next trip. 

It was too windy to cut the submerged logs out of waterway. I couldn’t keep the boat in place to pull them up and at the same time hold the logs stationary for cutting. They would have to wait for calmer weather as it had again begun to spit rain. It was a good time to sit on the log bench I had positioned near the end of the dock and enjoy the damp breeze rippling across the alder ecosystem.

Beavers had an active lodge beyond the cattails to the south. There were several small birds flitting among the alder branches, sometimes singing sweet little songs. A mother blue-wing teal and her four half-grown youngsters fed among the grasses and clumps just at the edge of the alders. I suspect that the predatory pike that prowled the edges had fed on part of her brood. In the cool water, myriad instances of minnows, small fish, and billions of insects and their larvae fed and were fed upon in an endless rotation of the vicissitudes of life. Some variety of water lily had produced a sprinkling of half-tubular white blossoms throughout the entire wetland.

I had come on this trip with the intention of conquering the swamp. I had accomplished that to a small extent. But in the larger picture, I had created an innocuous portal into this little piece of heaven that would be shared by the local wildlife. I had found a new friend to enjoy passing time with. I sat for an hour until the wind died down and the mosquitoes came out to feed in spite of the continuing sprinkle of rain. It was time for me to take the memories back to dry land. 

To get ready for the return to Virginia I decided to return Lawrence’s solar shower, some boots and some other items I had borrowed. I deposited them at his front door and covered them with a trash bag, mindful of the little silver kleptomaniac loose in the area. On my way out of his driveway, a young bull moose stepped into the road forty yards away. I lowered the truck window and we eyed each other for a small slice of our respective lives.

Later, the wind and rain let up again and I motored out to some nearby islands and caught another walleye and a yellow perch, both of which I cooked for dinner. I was out of beans and had to eat stewed tomatoes. You know it’s time to do something different at camp when you’re out of beans. As I lay in bed that night in the long twilight, I decided to fish all day on Wednesday. It was time to put some fish in the little freezer compartment to take back to Virginia. 

Wednesday broke cold, too cold for me to get up and go fishing early. The wind was blowing whitecaps on the lake. It was just not a good day for fishing. I decided to go anyway. I packed a lunch, Vienna sausage and crackers. I put on a heavy jacket and motored well down the lake to a large bay, bucking waves all the way. The half-dozen boats I saw all morning long were there, but only a few fish were being caught. I ate my lunch and decided to fish back toward the trailer.

 Fishing wasn’t good there either, but the wind stopped blowing. I motored to my dock and exchanged fishing gear for the chainsaw and a handsaw. I was able to clear a couple of the submerged logs from the boat slip and also removed some more grass roots. There were still a couple of logs left in the way, but I decided I’d need help with those. I took a look around with a bit of satisfaction. This was the end of the initial phase of building the dock. The next phase would be to pretty it up and consolidate my gains with dock hardware.  

The lake looked so great I decided to go fishing again. I caught a 17.5” walleye and another 12” yellow perch. These were the only fish I would take to Virginia. I finished up the leftover chili and tomatoes for dinner that night.

Thursday morning was clear and pretty, but the wind was blowing again. I took the boat to MB Resort, picked up Ken and returned to my dock. He helped me remove the last two submerged logs in the boat slip channel and put the tarp on the trailer, then he drove the boat back to the resort while I went around by road with the truck.

On the way there I met a medium-sized bear in the road. He faced me in an open area from about two hundred yards. I sped up to see what he would do. He looked at me for a moment before turning to run down the road in front of me. I almost caught up to him before he ran off the road into the brush, his deep fur bunching and shaking with each bound.

I returned Ken’s tools and we loaded my motor into the truck. They ordered a copy of my latest book. I said goodbye and headed back to the trailer. After packing everything tightly I let the trailer jack down in front so the roof would have an angle that would shed water more easily, locked shed and trailer and headed for Virginia at 7:01 p.m. I had driven 1862 miles, including one trip back to town. As I drove out I mentally looked back at my stay this time at this beautiful lake.

The trailer had been salvaged for future use. It would have been irreparably damaged, probably ruined, by rain and mouse infiltration had it not received attention at the time it did. The job of building and preserving the storage shed was completed. Much of the camp area brush and down timber was removed. A dock for boat access to the lake was installed. Old friendships were renewed, new ones begun. And I had enjoyed myself thoroughly in this whole process, weary bones and all!

So what didn’t I get done? In places the dock needed leveling and the loose boards needed to be anchored to the stringers with screws. Boat hitching hardware needed to be installed. Several other things I had hoped I might get done, but I just didn’t “get a round tuit.” I didn’t get plumbing installed to the shower and toilet and kitchen sink that would bypass the old damaged water system. I didn’t get the toilet hooked to the already installed septic tank. I didn’t install a gravity feed water tank. I had hoped to hook it up with the water pump to fill the tank from the well. That would take care of the non-drinking water needs, but if I have to carry water up the hill in a five-gallon bucket it’s not too bad either.  

I suspect that the freezer I lent Dale is a lost cause. Perhaps he understood that it was payment for some of the services he rendered. I will chalk it off and replace it for the next trip with a new one, perhaps one of my own construction. I intend to have a way to cool the old refrigerator in the trailer and to have ice to bring frozen fish home to Virginia in a box cooler.

The fact is there is still much work to be done. But more importantly, there is a lot of fishing to be done and sights to see and scenery to enjoy. Perhaps that amazing rainbow will materialize again when I have a camera in hand. I hope Linda is able to travel by the end of the summer, as I just have to take her up there and show her a little bit of heaven in the middle of an alder swamp.

I hope you have enjoyed this series of three articles half as much as I enjoyed reminiscing and writing them.      

© 2004 R. Leland Waldrip